


Faith, Like A Jackal

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Content warning: Suicide, Gen, M/M, Slow Burn, There will be a happy ending, also knit them sweaters, based partially on the Luzerne County "cash for kids" scandal, benarmie, contains investigative journalism, content warning: discussion of and implied non-graphic child sexual abuse, content warning: emotional abuse of minors, content warning: mentioned self-harm, content warning: physical abuse of minors, just hang in there, reform school au, this is based on real life horrors, you will want to hug them and feed them soup
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-03 18:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8726314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: Content Warning: Discussion of and implied non-graphic child sexual abuse.Content Warning: Physical abuse of minors.Content Warning: Emotional abuse of minors.Content Warning: Suicide.Content Warning: Mentioned self-harm---Armitage Hux has done nothing wrong save for being born out of wedlock to the wrong mother. His stepmother Maratelle resents him, and his father, who owns a reform school, has left Hux there for the past three years. He meets a young violent offender after the suicide of his previous roommate. Kylo Ren, as the kid prefers to be called, claims that he entered the juvenile justice system because he shot his father. Hux does not want to get attached to Ren. It hurts less if you don't care about them, when they eventually turn on you, get released, or are broken by the system. But Ren's odd blend of bravado and vulnerability is hard to resist, and they soon become fast friends.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Herman Melville's _Moby Dick_ , namely a sentence in the chapter "The Chapel", which reads: _But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope._
> 
> Please observe the content warnings on this fic - there are many, and they are warranted. This narrative is inspired heavily by the events of the Luzerne County, PA "Cash-for-Kids" scandal, where two corrupt judges and a crooked ADA funneled kids into juvenile detention centers to earn kickbacks from the companies that ran them. Also informing this are the stories of parents who send erring children to "boot camps" without actually realizing how terrible those places are, or who don't care how terrible those places are.
> 
> I'm sure that I am, in here, doing a disservice towards the ends of the justice system that aim at rehabilitation as opposed to punitive punishment, but the fact is that attitudes towards crime and incarceration are still heavily weighted in favor of punitive measures, at least in the US where this fic is set. 
> 
> This is, ultimately, a story about survivors surviving as best as they can, and I owe my initial inspiration to Omega_Hux and spacegaycentral, whom I dedicate this story to.

Armitage Hux lay on his side in his lumpy, narrow bunk, trying to go to sleep, aware that he had just turned seventeen half an hour ago. Pale moonlight shone in through the room’s sole window, it being barred and too small for any kind of consolation, but he had turned his back to the outside world and the moon and stars and pulled the rough blanket up to his chin instead. 

Today hadn’t been all that bad. There had been a new shirt for him from the Institute, still stiff from its plastic wrapper, and a single, cloying cupcake. Alma, his favorite lunch lady, had given him a big hug and sincere good wishes when she had brought out the cupcake with the candle in it, and several of the students in the cafeteria had sung a half-hearted rendition of “Happy Birthday”.

Hux tried not to think of the empty bunk above him. His roommate Mitaka had been absent at lights-out and he knew fairly well what that meant, and felt genuinely sorry about it. It wasn’t as though Mitaka had been some kind of asshole - he was genuinely out of his depth in the Arkanis Institute, having been sent here after his parents had caught him with a joint and called the cops on him. 

Hux had warned him to stay away from the cadaverous Father Snoke the moment he they had met - all the boys here, no matter how jaded or hardened, always warned the fresh meat who and what to avoid. Avoiding this duty meant that you were officially on Their Side, a collaborator, and collaborators weren’t to be trusted. It was one of the unspoken rules of the Institute. You warned the others whether you liked them or not, carried your own weight, and never trusted the staff. 

Especially not the nice ones. 

The door opened with a soft click and footsteps shuffled into the room before it shut again. Hux heard the lock engage and then sat up in the dark. A sob escaped into the dark room, a sharp gasp, and then another heaving exhalation. 

“Mitt?” Hux asked, sitting up in his bed. He could see his roommate’s blurry silhouette in the faint moonlight. “Do you want me to sit up with you?”

The bunk bed creaked as Mitaka leaned heavily against the ladder leading to the top bunk. Hux couldn’t see Mitaka’s face, but he knew what he would see. Pain and shame, a muted, numb kind of horror, and flagging anger. The dull shock of learned helplessness. Hux wondered if Mitaka had told his parents about what was really going on in the Arkanis Institute. Cynically, he wondered if they actually cared. If they had truly loved him they wouldn’t have called the cops on their own son for a single joint. They would have fought for him, gotten a decent lawyer, something. Anything. 

“No,” The word came out on a rush of breath, and Hux knew from the sound of Mitaka’s breathing that he was trying not to cry too loudly. “I just want to go to - I just want to lie down,” he said at last. 

“Okay.” Hux lay back down as he heard Mitaka climbing up to his bunk, felt the faint shuddering of the bedframe as his weight distributed itself across the slats on the upper bunk. He would be crying himself to sleep, as he had in the last two months he had been here. Four months left to go for Mitaka. Hux closed his eyes and sighed. 

Hux had been here three years - since he turned fourteen - and unlike Mitaka he had no sentence to wait out save the natural passage of time. Boys normally came to the Arkanis Institute via the juvenile courts - delinquents, or criminals, or, like Mitaka, just youthful rebels with bad luck. Hux’s stepmother had finally tired of rearing a cuckoo’s get in her household, and his father had sent him here. “Until Maratelle calms down,” Brendol Hux had said, but there had been no further contact in the three years that had passed. 

It didn’t matter to the staff that Armitage Hux had never broken the law in his life, and that he wasn’t supposed to be here - his father owned the Arkanis Institute, after all. And even if he tried to tell someone, who would believe him? Maratelle would simply continue painting him as a bad seed, accuse him of abusing his step-siblings and give a judge an excuse to leave him here. He knew his dad was bribing someone in the California juvenile justice system to sentence kids heavily, after all - it would be a simple favor to make sure he remained in the Institute until he turned 18, which would leave him no better off than he already was.

There was a soft, muffled hiccup from the upper bunk, a familiar sound by now. Hux only wished he could cry. The tears had simply run out at some point in his stay here, somewhere between fifteen and sixteen. Instead he found a place in the back of his head where he could watch the world free and floating and distant while things happened to his body. It was a good space, a safe space, and nobody could hurt him while he was there. Hux liked to imagine himself as a goldfish circling around in a fishbowl made up of his own skull, imagined cold water running through him with each breath, cleansing and tasting of nothing at all. 

Hux had started to doze off when he felt a faint splash on his face - something wet, warm. Tears? Nobody could cry enough to soak a mattress, he thought as he blinked his eyes open. Another drop splatted itself on his cheek, and he watched blurrily as dark streaks ran down the wall he was facing, vertical lines growing longer by the second. 

Hux reached up with a hand to wipe the wetness off his face, registered its darkness on his hand. _Blood._ He sat up quickly, suddenly, and rolled his legs off the bed, stood up in the dark. 

“Mitt?” he asked, his heart pounding suddenly, fiercely aching in his chest, “Mitaka?” The blood grew tacky on his face as he climbed up the ladder to the top bunk, took hold of his roommate’s ankle. It was a chancy business, crawling up into the top bunk without hurting Mitaka more. A tiny insidious whisper rasped in his skull, _as though he cares about being hurt now_ \- but Hux would not give up on the chance that Mitaka lived still. 

“Talk to me, Mitaka,” Hux whispered frantic as he peeled Mitaka’s blanket away, pulled the gore-soaked pillow from his face to stare into his face, glassy-eyed, pale under the bloodstains, in the near-dark. Hux reached up to feel for a pulse, found wet and warmth instead. He looked down and saw the neat stab wound just under the soft spot of Mitaka’s jaw, the blood soaked deep into the mattress and smeared onto the wall. There was no pulse, no heartbeat, and Hux saw that Mitaka’s fingers clutched a sharpened toothbrush that he didn’t even know his roommate had possession of until now. 

“Oh, Mitt,” Hux whispered, did not ask why, not when he knew exactly why this had happened. He pressed his forehead against Mitaka’s still-warm brow and felt a fierce prickling in his eyes, a bittersweet triumph as the tears hung on his eyelashes and dripped to mingle with the blood on Mitaka’s face. 

_I’m not crying for myself,_ Hux thought, as he sucked in a long, shaky breath between his own sobs. _It’s just that Mitt can’t cry any more. So I’m crying for him, that’s all._

\--- 

Hux was confined to a room intended for students on suicide watch while the higher-ups got everything sorted out. At least that was the ostensible excuse. “Can’t have you in there sleeping under a blood-soaked mattress,” one of the guards told him as he was escorted to his new room, but he was under no illusion that they had something as insignificant as his welfare to mind. No, chances were that they were getting rid of as much evidence as they could while his father hosed down the deck. 

This room was slightly nicer than his old one had been - just a single bed in it, a desk and chair and a locker, but Hux could look out of the barred window as he sat on the desk. He wore several of his colored pencils to stubs sketching and drawing as his meals were brought to him, took his showers in the adjoining bathroom, and had books passed to him from the institute’s library by request. 

This was the closest thing to privacy that Hux had been allowed in the past three years. He knew, of course, that he was being watched, but it was still nicer than snap inspections of his room and things and having to shower with all the other boys while guards watched them. A worm of guilt nibbled constantly within, however, whenever he thought of Mitaka. Part of his mind scoffed cynically at how he had cracked after only two months at the Arkanis Institute - another part pointed out that he wouldn’t wish the Institute on his worst enemies, and that he couldn’t blame Mitaka for making the only choice he could given the situation. 

Hux hoped Mitaka’s parents sued. He didn’t really hold any hope that a lawsuit would change things, but it would annoy his father, at the very least. A strange impulse hit him then, and he ripped out an empty page from his sketchbook and wrote on it in a clear print with his crow quill pen: _Dopheld Mitaka killed himself in the Arkanis Institute last night. He was 16. Remember his name._ Hux wrote the date beneath the sentences at the top of the page, signed his name with a flourish. He then poked at his thumb with the steel nib of his pen until it bled, squeezed the pad of his thumb until the blood welled out of the small, irritating wound in a dark, fat drop. 

He pressed his thumb to the paper right over his signature, left his bloody thumbprint smudged on the ink as proof that he had written it, and folded the paper over, hunching over his sketchbook in usual fashion so that his watchers would not suspect that anything was untoward. Afterwards he slipped the folded paper between the pages of a dictionary, washed the ink-pen in the bathroom sink, and sucked at his thumb until the bleeding stopped.

It was odd how savory the blood tasted against the bumps of his tongue - coppery and salty - and he licked again and again at the whorl of his fingerprint until he tasted only his own sweetish spit. The tiny wound prickled and itched faintly as Hux pushed his chair back and shut his sketchbook, took up the copy of Moby Dick and took it to bed. The pages were well-worn, soft and furry at the corners from the wear of many, many hands - the hardback copy he was reading dated back to the 1970s. Hux propped the book up on his pillow, and lay on his stomach on top of the blanket.

_Call me Ishmael,_ he whispered quietly to himself as he read the first line aloud. This wasn’t the first time he had read Melville, nor would it be the last - Hux gleaned old books like a starving dog trying to gnaw some nourishment from bones, mentally chewing at gristly prose until it softened enough for his imagination to swallow. He thought, between chapters, of the note hidden in his dictionary, of the other boys outside this single solitary room and shut his eyes, curled up on his side and pushed the heavy hardcover book off his pillow so he could rest his head. 

_I won’t forget you, Mitt,_ Hux thought as the afternoon sunlight grew dimmer and the shadows grew longer. _I won’t let them forget you, either. Just one more year. They’re going to have to let me out eventually._

\--- 

In the end Hux remained in his improvised solitary confinement for four days. Guards came to collect him on the morning of the fifth day, just after he had finished getting dressed. He paused for a brief panicky moment, his mind whirling behind the emotionless expression he had learned to wear while interacting with Them. They could search his room at any time, he knew, and look through his few possessions. Not that he had anything that was strictly contraband, except for the memorial note he had written and then stuffed in his dictionary. 

Well, nothing he could do about that, now. Hux meekly let the guards usher him out of the room and down a hallway that led to the cafeteria - it wasn’t quite breakfast time yet, and most of the students would still be standing at attention in the hot yard, listening to the morning address before they were turned out into the cafeteria to enjoy thawed, precooked bacon, tasteless as parchment, and runny scrambled eggs reconstituted from powder. 

There was only one person seated within the empty cafeteria - a slender, stretched-thin brittle blonde that Hux recognized instantly as his stepmother, Assistant District Attorney Maratelle Stephens-Hux. She was dressed, as usual, in a sharp designer suit that looked like it cost more than most folks’ monthly salaries, and she drummed her manicured fingertips impatiently on the scuffed plastic table as the guards marched him straight to her table and, with heavy hands on his shoulders, encouraged him to sit. Hux looked nothing like her, which was only natural. His red hair echoed his father Brendol in his youth, and his fair complexion was closer to that of his birth mother’s. 

Hux sat in silence, glancing wordlessly at her through his eyelashes. He kept his head hanging low and let his hands rest in his lap, trying to look appropriately cowed. She had taken an instant dislike to him in the weeks after his father had taken him in, when he had been four years old, after his real mother had died. She looked tired today, stretched out, the dark circles under her eyes visible even through the layers of concealer and foundation and her boughten suntan. 

“I have an offer for you,” Maratelle said without preamble, once the guards left and crossed the cafeteria to wait, flanking the doors. 

Hux waited for her to speak, remaining mute and dumb. Any speech that she thought was out of turn would provoke a shouting fit, and he knew better than to interrupt her. He didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but he was terrified of his stepmother - less of her harming him physically, as much as how skilled she was at pinning blame on others. His father had regarded him with a kind of contemptuous indifference, but Maratelle had demonstrated to him how much words could and would hurt. She was living proof that the sticks and stones proverb was total bullshit. 

“As you know fairly well by now, the Mitaka boy killed himself several days ago,” Maratelle continued. “He was your roommate, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hux said softly and quietly. His hands shook in his lap, and he curled them into tight fists, his short nails biting into the skin of his palms. He loathed the thought of his fear and anger showing, but there was a glint of triumph in his stepmother’s eyes that told him she had caught that flash of involuntary reaction before he had managed to stifle it. 

“His parents are kicking up a big fuss,” Maratelle said, “Which means there’s going to be an investigation. Now I’m sure you’re going to be sensible and not try to get your father in trouble, but.” She shrugged and reached into the attaché case at her side, pulled out a folder containing a sheaf of papers. “Brendol would like you to sign these.”

She shoved the papers over to Hux, who squinted briefly at the dense typewritten legalese on the page before looking confusedly up at her. _I’m not going to sign this without a lawyer,_ he thought but did not say, feigned ignorance instead. “What does it say, ma’am?” 

Maratelle’s white, perfect smile widened, and for a moment he fancied that her teeth were arrayed in repeating rows, curled like those of a mako shark. Hux had never seen a mako shark’s jaws before, but he had read the description in an Earnest Hemingway novel and could imagine them quite vividly. “This,” she said, “says that you’ll testify, if required to, that you have absolutely no idea why the Mitaka boy killed himself. Also, that you will not disclose information pertaining to the administration and running of the Arkanis Institute. In exchange, we’re willing to make sure your last year in high school and your four years in college are paid for, and we’ll even send you back to your mother.” 

Hux straightened up from his slouch in a frigid kind of shock that jolted through him like an icicle driven down his throat to impale him, staring blindly upwards, to the seat of his chair, and looked straight into Maratelle’s cold grey eyes. They weren’t naturally that color, he knew - she used contacts. “My mother,” he said numbly, forgetting to speak politely. “Dad told me she was dead.” 

“Did he?” Maratelle shrugged, “He probably only told you that to make you stop asking for her.” 

Hux swallowed, the stinging in the palms of his hands growing sharper - he was probably bleeding by now, he thought, dimly behind the roar of his pulse in his ears. “If you’re sending me back to her,” he managed to rasp out of a suddenly dry throat, “where is she, and why did she give me up to Dad?” 

“Because,” Maratelle hissed, as she stood up and reached across the table to grab Hux by the jaw, “I had thought that a little boy like you would have done better being cared for by me, instead of some whore who got sent to prison when a cop found drugs in her car.” His stepmother’s nails dug into his skin, her fingers surprisingly strong, and he had to grab his right hand with his left to prevent himself from flinching and pushing her away. She would cry assault if he did, had done so whenever Hux had defended himself until Brendol had taken him here to the Institute. 

“Instead,” she continued, “you continued to cry and beg for her constantly. I could never make you shut up. Even after Brendol told you she was dead, you kept crying for her, you ungrateful little shit.” 

Hux bit hard on his lower lip, and he tasted blood as Maratelle let go of his face and let him drop back into his chair. “She should have been in Framingham State Prison for a few more years, but some irregularities in her case turned up and they let her go about eight months ago. You can go join her in Boston if you want. You only need to sign this agreement.” 

“You want me to forget everything that ever happened here,” Hux whispered, staring at his stepmother. His lip stung fiercely as he spoke - how hard had he bitten it? “What if I can’t?” 

Maratelle shoved the folder in his face again, thrusting the papers towards him. “I don’t really care if you can’t forget,” she said, “I only care that you won’t say anything.” 

Hux thought of Mitaka’s pale, glazed face staring emptily up at him in the dark, of the blood soaking through the mattress and dripping down the wall, remembered other things that swam uncomfortably before his mind’s eye. _I am a fish,_ he thought at himself, _just a fish watching humans from the water._ “And what if I don’t?” he managed to make himself say. 

“I can strongly suggest that the Mitaka boy’s death wasn’t a suicide, you know. That you were the one who stabbed him in the neck. That would keep you here until you’re twenty-one, and after that, there’s no real guarantee that you won’t also be a druggie like your birth mother.” Maratelle’s smile was wide, perfect, humorless.

“You were behind my mother’s arrest,” Hux rasped, the connection crackling to life like a poorly grounded power line. His nerves buzzed, thrummed with adrenaline, but he did not move from his seat, did not twitch a muscle. He could feel his anger now, banked carefully among the ashes of his heart to keep a last flicker of defiance alive. It burned deep in his gut with the hunger, the jitters, a tiny ever-present indignation aching fiercely with each breath.

“You can’t prove it,” Maratelle shrugged. She pulled a pen from her purse, rolled it over to Hux’s side of the table. “Sign the papers.” 

Hux did not reach out to pick up the pen. He knew, even from the safe space in the back of his head, that if he did, he would uncap it and try to stab his stepmother in the eye. His dwindling hopes of freedom were still not worth the satisfaction he would get from blinding or killing her. “No,” he whispered. 

“No?” Maratelle asked, her eyes cold and hard and patient. “You have nothing to lose.” 

_And Dopheld Mitaka had everything to lose,_ Hux thought, knew that he too would lose no matter whether he signed the papers or not. He made himself imagine the middle of a cool lake, of how the water would rush through his mouth and out through his gills as he swam away from this place, from his stepmother, from everything that had ever hurt him in his seventeen years of life. And then he thought of his dead friend and roommate again, and felt a decision solidify somewhere within his gut in that uneasy span between his liver and solar plexus.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Maratelle,” Hux lisped softly through his bleeding lip, “because I value my integrity, unlike you. Or Dad.” 

He did not flinch when Maratelle struck him hard across the face, her fingernails scratching his cheek. “I hope,” she told him as she collected the pen and papers and shoved them back into her purse, “that your precious integrity comforts you while that withered old priest makes you suck his cock.” She stood and gestured impatiently to the guards, who came to collect Hux and take him out of the cafeteria. 

Neither of them spoke to him. They only ushered him down the hallways with their usual impassive calm, back to the room he had been staying in. “Pack your stuff up, kid,” one of the guards told him, not unkindly as he stepped into the room. “You’re getting moved back to regular dormitories today.” 

Someone had already been by to leave a large cardboard box on his desk, and Hux packed his spare clothing, his toiletries and his books carefully in it. He did not dare to look in his dictionary to see if the note was still there, only piled his sketchbook and the copy of Moby Dick on top instead. His colored pencils went into their zippered cases along with his crow quill pen, and then he was escorted back to his old room. 

\--- 

Janitorial services had been by some time in the past four days. The blood-stained mattress had been replaced with a new one, and the blood on the wall painted neatly over with a fresh coat of paint, its sharp odor lingering still in the air. There was another boy there - gangly, taller than Hux’s own five feet ten, his shoulders broad under the thin fabric of his t-shirt. He had clearly just arrived - he was still pulling his belongings, what the staff had allowed him to keep, out of a duffel bag sitting on the mattress of Hux’s lower bunk. Books, mostly, some clothes. His hair waved unruly, black as India ink down to his shoulders, and his eyes were dark, startlingly reflective in the morning light. 

He flashed a crooked, sardonic grin in Hux’s direction, but did not say anything until the guards shut the door and left. 

“Hi,” he said, his voice deep and surprisingly resonant. “I suppose you’re my cellmate.” 

“Armitage Hux,” Hux said, still holding the box of his belongings close to his chest as he tried to gauge the stranger. It didn’t matter if he seemed friendly. Hux had learned that the potential for violence could lurk under the most unlikely demeanors. 

“Hux,” his new roommate said, “You sound kinda British. My mother calls me Ben Solo, but I’d prefer it if you called me Ren. Kylo Ren.” 

“My father is a dual citizen,” Hux said slowly, the sibilants hissing around his swollen lower lip, “and you’re putting your stuff on my bunk, Ren.” 

“Oh,” Ren paused and began to put his things on the desk instead, “my bad. They told me you were under suicide watch when I got here, so I didn’t know which bunk was yours.” 

Hux chose to take that as a kind of encouragement that Ren wasn’t going to hurt him - not at least over which bunk was whose, and put his cardboard box down on the foot of the mattress. “I wasn’t,” Hux said at last. He reached into the box and drew out the copy of _Moby Dick,_ pushed his sketchbook aside and pulled his dictionary out. “The guy who was here before you,” Hux continued, “ _he_ killed himself.” 

_Please, still be there,_ he thought as he opened the dictionary, found with a rush of relief that his note was still there. _Thank you, Merriam-Webster, for keeping this safe._

“What was his name?” Ren asked, his gaze oddly intent as he glanced at the stiff paper in Hux’s hands. 

Hux unfolded it and passed it over to Ren. “His name is - was Dopheld Mitaka. He was sixteen.” 

“Remember his name,” Ren murmured, oddly intense as he read the page that he held in his hand. He reached over to the pile of belongings on the desk and took out his freshly-issued personal hygiene kit, pulled one of the two disposable razors out and ran the blade along his left index finger until it bled. 

Hux watched Ren wait for the blood to bead up, and continued watching as he pressed his fingertip to the paper. Ren’s hands were large, his wrists sinewy and strong. He looked fully capable of lifting Hux and breaking him easily in half over a knee. Ren held his bleeding finger to the hem of his t-shirt as he put the razor back into the zip-lock bag with his right. “How did he manage it? Mitaka, I mean. How’d he do it?” 

“Stabbed himself in the neck with a sharpened toothbrush.” Hux emptied the books and his pencil case out onto his bunk, took the box with his clothing and toiletries in it to his locker. 

None of this seemed to shock Ren, who instead fumbled in his duffel bag for a ragged old notebook. Jammed between its pages was a pencil stub. Ren drew the pencil out of the notebook and then signed his name on the bloody fingerprint, handed the sheet back to Hux, who folded it back up and tucked it carefully under the waistband of his trousers. He would adjust his shirttails later to hide it better if he were frisked in the halls. 

“What are you going to do with that?” Ren asked him, apropos of nothing. 

“You didn’t ask why Mitt killed himself,” Hux said, to distract Ren from the page. He hadn’t expected Ren to sign it or mark it with a fingerprint, not at all. 

Ren shrugged carelessly. “I don’t think I have to look very hard to find an answer.” 

“Look, Ren -” Hux sighed. He shut his locker door and put the cardboard box down on the bed. He wondered if the guards would let him keep it. It wasn’t as though it could hurt anyone, and he could keep his books in it. He sat down on his bunk, and sighed. “I need to tell you some things before we talk more.” 

“Oh, yeah?” The question wasn’t a challenge - it sounded as though Ren were genuinely curious about what Hux had to say. 

“The rules,” Hux sighed. 

Ren propped himself on the corner of the table, his broad hands gripping the sides as his legs dangled down to reach the floor. Damn, he was tall. “They already told me the rules at my intake -” 

Hux cut him off with a gesture, a brief shake of his head. “Not those rules. Our rules. As in - all of us. Keep your head low,” Hux recited, counting down on his fingers, “Do your own time. Don’t snitch. Don’t fuck with anyone and they won’t fuck with you. Save the guards and staff, of course. And I have to warn you. Stay away from Father Snoke, don’t let him catch you alone anywhere. Wilkerson, Smythe and Romano, they’re guards - don’t trust them no matter how friendly they seem.” 

“What do they do?” Ren asked, his eyes veiled beneath his messy hair. How had the barbers not cut his hair yet? “Fuck inmates?” 

“Sometimes,” Hux shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. “Snoke usually. The other guys, mostly they just decide to deal with a bad day by beating the shit out of someone. Sometimes they plant contraband on a troublemaker.” 

Ren shook his head, looked down his nose at Hux, as though appraising him and subsequently finding him wanting. “I’d like to see them try.” 

“Don’t resist,” Hux warned him. “They’ll just tase you and stick you in solitary, then go take that out on someone else. You’re not alone here, even if you want to be. Make too much trouble for everyone else, and you won’t have anyone to watch your back.” 

Ren nodded quietly, once. “You sound like you’ve been here a while,” he said after a brief moment of thought. 

“Three years.” Hux felt a smile spreading across his face, felt his bitten lip sting as the cut reopened again. He always gained a morbid kind of satisfaction from new roommates’ reactions, especially the big ones who glanced at him and assumed that he was skinny and fragile and easily coerced. 

“Three years,” Ren breathed, raising an eyebrow, “what the hell did you do?” 

Hux shook his head. “You first, Ren.” 

“I shot my dad,” Ren said, in the same tone of voice someone would use to read a grocery list. Hux read his expression as well as the tone of his voice, however, and saw the brief tremor in his right hand, the faintest hint of anguish behind his eyes. “Your turn, Hux.” 

“Absolutely nothing,” Hux said, struggling internally to maintain the jaded expression that meant safety in a place such as this. It was difficult when he was confronted with the raw hurt in Ren’s gaze. “My father, he runs this place.” Hux’s nose stang sharply, but he pushed the feeling away, thought instead of water and the way sound distorted underwater, let it calm him a little.

“And he put you here,” Ren murmured, the words oddly soft, freighted with sympathy that Hux no longer allowed himself to expect or trust. 

Hux only shrugged, nonchalant, as he dabbed the blood away from his chin with the cuff of his shirt sleeve. “My stepmother doesn’t like me,” he said at last, unsure of how to react to Ren’s obvious pity. _I shouldn’t get attached to him,_ Hux thought, hating himself briefly in that moment, _he’s never going to last long with emotions like that._

“And I thought I had a shitty dad.” Ren slid off the table, stepped closer to glance at the raw scratches on Hux’s face and the angry red crescents of Maratelle’s nail-marks on his jawline. Hux made himself stay relaxed as Ren studied him carefully. He wanted to flinch or to brace himself, curl his hands into fists to defend himself. It took an act of will to remind himself that Ren had just come from Outside, that his life hadn’t been made up of fear and meaningless violence and violation until now. 

“It’s a surprisingly common affliction,” Hux said, held the smile on his face like a stiff mask until Ren stepped back. 

“I suppose,” Ren murmured then, and then there was a hard banging on the room door. It opened to admit Pruitt, a new guard hire who had so far not done anything overly fucked-up in Hux’s experience. 

“Hey, you two,” he said, looking first at Ren, and then at Hux seated on his bunk. “It’s breakfast time. You’ll go to the cafeteria without a fuss, yeah?” 

The question, Hux knew, was aimed more at Ren than at him. It made sense. Kylo Ren was built like a football quarterback, and was also a violent offender. He looked about sixteen or seventeen, which meant that he had been lucky not to be charged as an adult. Lucky or white enough, and this could have been his first offense. 

“Sure,” Ren said. Hux let him step out into the hallway before he got up and followed, watched his roommate’s smooth, easy movements as he prowled out the door. Six weeks, maybe, he thought, maybe three months at the most. Kylo Ren was the kind of boy, Hux guessed, who wouldn’t admit weakness, not even while it was staring him in the face. He would go down refusing help on the splintered stumps of his legs while the system ground him down with its indifferent cruelty. 

It was a mindset that was both courageous and grandly stupid, but it would do neither of them any good at all. Not in here. 

\--- 

Ren stayed close to Hux for most of the morning, and Hux decided to ask him about it while they were filling in worksheets in English class. Most of the “schoolwork” at the Arkanis Institute was meant solely as busywork, and Hux knew that most kids leaving the Institute after a year or more had to repeat grades at school because they had learned nothing of academic value during their stay. 

That had been another reason he had rejected Maratelle’s offer - Hux wasn’t sure he was fit for a normal classroom and syllabus even if he were freed tomorrow and given a place to stay and a school to go to. He had tried to keep up with his studies on his own, consulting and bribing new inmates to go over various subjects with him in the school library. It was slow going, however, and the lack of feedback and grading meant that he had no idea of his progress at all. 

The only class he really enjoyed was art class, and that was only because Mr. Prentiss, the instructor, had given up on making anyone finish their assignments, which meant that he concentrated his efforts on the few students who did, Hux included. He didn’t really see himself as talented - drawing never came naturally to him, but he had plenty of time and a keen eye for observation, and amused himself drawing still life compositions and landscape work when he could. 

Kylo Ren had been assigned to a desk in the back of the classroom, next to Hux. It was where the taller students all sat. He scribbled through his worksheet in roughly five minutes, and then turned it over and started doodling on the back as Hux flipped his sketchbook open and checked the hand-drawn timetable on it, then shut it again. He tried not to glance over and read Ren’s doodles - he had enough to carry right now, and he wouldn’t pick someone else’s burdens up by getting too friendly with them. 

“If you think I can protect you from anyone here, just because my father owns the Institute? You’d be wrong,” Hux murmured very softly to Ren as he pored over his finished English worksheet, trying as hard as he could to look like he was asking for help on an answer. 

“... No?” Ren murmured. He looked up from his doodles, his dark-dark eyes hooded, irises mostly hidden behind long eyelashes. “I can protect myself. I just thought you might be a good person to observe, seeing you’ve been here so long. You know how to survive in here better than I might, and I might as well learn how, from you.” 

Hux did not respond, not at first. Ren’s assumption was a wise one, and Hux adjusted his mental estimate of Ren’s survival upwards. He was surprisingly canny despite the jockish exterior. “How old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen? What grade are you supposed to be in this year?” 

“I don’t see why -” Ren meant to continue his reply, but he shrank visibly in his uncomfortable chair as he realized that his voice had crept above a whisper. “I’m sixteen, but I already finished high school - I kinda skipped a couple grades on the way up. Why?” 

Hux nodded, his eyes narrowing as he added the new information to the web of favors he kept track on only in his head. “You don’t need to be a genius to realize that they expect us to be idiots here,” he murmured to Ren. “I’m in charge of the Library Club. It’s mostly a group of us trying to make sure we can pass a GED by the time we get out of the Institute, and we help shelve and sort books in between. We’d love someone who’s familiar with the current high school syllabus to help us stay on track. I could introduce you to them.” 

Ren raised an eyebrow. “What’s the catch?” he asked. He was learning fast. 

“No real catch, unless you want to spend the next year bored out of your mind. We’re a study group, not a gang. But if you want to get to know other people here who might be helpful to know, that’s a good place to start. You could also impress Coach Zimmer. He’s a bit of a hardass, used to be a DI, but he’s absolutely obsessed with football. He might want to recruit you.” 

“Because I’m so big, you mean?” Ren mused. 

“Yeah. Don’t worry, he’s not a creep, just an asshole,” Hux whispered, but the conversation went no further. In the front of the classroom their English teacher put his copy of Reader’s Digest down and stood up, beckoned impatiently for the students to pass up their worksheets. Hux passed his own sheet forwards, and then waited for Mr. Costa to collect them and leave the room. 

The lunch bell rang, and Hux stood up himself, collected his sketchbook and nodded in the direction of Kylo Ren, who got up and followed him to the cafeteria. Kylo Ren wrinkled his nose as a greasy, vaguely rancid odor drifted out into the hallway from the open doors. 

“I hope you like institutional food,” Hux said, shrugged. “If not, well, I guess you’ve got some time to get used to it.” 

\--- 

“Hey,” someone said, as Hux sat down at one of the ends of his usual table in the cafeteria. The speaker was a handsome, dark-skinned black kid named Finn, who had been in the Institute six months, mostly for walking while black in a rich white neighborhood. One of the assholes living there had taken him for a would-be burglar and had called the cops on him. 

“Hey,” Hux called back, nodded at Ren, who had taken a seat facing him. The other boys at the table shifted politely down the bench to give his broad shoulders more room. “This is my new roommate, Ren.” Hux put his lunch tray down on the table, poked indifferently at the spongy mass of reconstituted powdered mashed potato in one of the compartments. 

“I heard of you,” one of the other boys said, a blond-haired kid named Thanisson, who was in for braining his abusive dad with a claw hammer in self-defense, “You’re the one who shot your dad in the chest.” He glanced curiously at Ren as he spoke, but his voice held no threat or anger, only a certain jaded curiosity. 

“Yeah,” Ren said, sighed as he pushed a straw through a small tetra-pak box of milk, “I did.” 

“Hux give you the warning yet?” Finn asked, as he forked up a bunch of brownish reheated canned green beans, “Who to avoid and all that.” 

“Yeah,” Ren nodded, “The three guards, right? And the creepy priest.” 

“Well, I’d worry more about Wilkerson and Smythe if I were you,” Rodinon piped in, “they don’t like dealing with kids bigger and in better shape than they are. Romano’s too chickenshit to try and fight you. Plus, you’re not really Father Snoke’s type.” 

“No,” agreed Finn, “he really only likes the skinnier, prettier kids. Younger ones, or ones who look young. Like Mitaka, or I guess Hux or Thanni, now Mitaka’s gone.” 

“Yeah,” Thanisson sighed, and Rodinon clapped him on the shoulder hard, but not hard enough to hurt. Hux felt Kylo Ren’s stare burning in his direction, blinked before he stabbed one of the dried-out chicken nuggets on his plate with his fork. If he wasn’t careful his feelings would rise up beneath the pit in his belly where he confined them, and reduce him to a wreck again. 

“Has he hurt you, too?” Ren asked Hux, his voice kept very soft and low over the noise of the cafeteria. 

“It doesn’t hurt very much any more,” Hux said in his best, clipped imitation of his father’s accent. The conversation at the table died down to a respectful silence as Thanisson blinked hard, too, but did not cry. Wordlessly Hux extended a fist to him, and they bumped knuckles once before returning to their meals. 

“I’m sorry about Mitaka, Thanni,” Hux said, as conversation failed to return. 

“So’m I. But nobody can hurt him any more, I guess,” Thannison said, softly. His eyes were dry now, but they looked irritated, as though he had cried himself to sleep recently. 

The both of them had been quite friendly with each other. Nothing romantic, as far as Hux could tell, but then they had absolutely no privacy to themselves, and being caught fucking led to solitary confinement and weapons-grade humiliation being rained down upon the students caught _in flagrante delicto_ by the teachers, guards and other staff. That and the presence of Father Snoke meant that even jacking off was risky. Hux wasn’t sure if it was the same for everyone here, but his experiences had made it difficult for him to even think of sex without having nauseating bouts of panic and revulsion twisting in his gut. It was so much easier to just let his mind go away and drift away from his body whenever anything remotely sexual happened.

“Who’s coming for study session today?” Hux asked the rest of the group, wanting to change the mood before everyone got too depressed to eat. They needed their nutrition, all of them. Heaven knew that they were getting little enough of it from the food here. 

“I am,” Finn said, and most of the other kids at the table echoed his agreement. 

“Good. Ren’s joining us today, and he’s already finished his high school syllabus. I asked him to join us so he can help us stay current on what’s being taught in 11th and 12th grades,” Hux said, after he had eaten the nugget he had so viciously impaled upon his fork. He had learned to ignore its gristly texture from long practice and experience in the cafeteria. Vile as this was, it contained nourishment that his body needed.

A vague murmur of approval ran up and down the table in response.“Since you’ve finished high school,” Rodinon ventured after it had subsided, “Could you help by grading some of our work? I mean, you probably can’t grade essays or anything, but you could grade math, right? Then we’d know what we were doing wrong.” 

“Sure,” Ren said. He had barely touched his lunch. “Can’t you guys get books from outside, or anything?” 

“Exercises don’t help much without feedback, plus the books in the library are all twenty to forty years old,” Finn supplied. He had already cleaned his plate, and was sipping at his box of milk. 

“No, I mean -” Ren held his fork up in the air, jabbing with it as he gestured, “I mean, does anyone know if I’m allowed to get my old textbooks sent to me from home?” 

“Yeah, yeah you can,” Thanisson said, “if your parents still give a shit about you, anyway. Mine don’t.” 

“The guards are going to search’em to make sure there’s no contraband hidden in them, of course,” Rodinon continued, “but they’ll just flip through them to make sure. Just ask them not to bother sending food, because the guards are gonna confiscate it from you anyway.” 

“I guess I could write back home then, see if my mom’ll pack my old books and notes from 11th and 12th grade and mail them to me so I can revise stuff with you,” Ren said thoughtfully after he ate a cooling forkful of mashed potato. “I took AP Physics and English Lit, I’ll be able to help more with those subjects.” 

“Will she even do that after you shot your dad?” Hux asked, curious, “I mean -” He imagined Maratelle’s response to him shooting his father, and vice versa, and he wasn’t sure there would have been enough left of him to bury afterwards. 

Ren shrugged, his broad shoulders heaving briefly upwards. “She still loves me,” he said unevenly, his voice betraying the emotions that blazed in his eyes even as his face remained stoic. “I can’t see why she wouldn’t, even now.” 

“Okay,” Hux sighed, trying to stifle the sharp pang of envy that gnawed sickly at his heart, felt it sink sluggishly as he stifled it with an effort of will. “Just do me a favor, Ren.” 

“What?” Ren looked nonplussed, and then calculating, as though anticipating some kind of quid-pro-quo. 

“Finish your lunch,” Hux told him. “My dad’s a cheap bastard and he’s been feeding us the minimum healthy caloric intake for kids our age, and you don’t want to help him starve you to death.” 

“Yeah,” Finn agreed, along with Thannison and Rodinon and the others. 

“Living well is the best revenge, huh?” Ren suggested as he forked up more mashed potatoes, and Hux felt his bitten lip sting in a brief but genuine smile. 

“I can’t say we’re living well,” Hux said, “But we’re alive. And I’ll take that over dying for now.” 

\--- 

Study session went surprisingly well. Ren had, as promised, gone over everyone’s notebooks and checked their math, taking time to explain and correct where mistakes had been made. Hux had felt a faint kind of pride lurking beneath his usual reserve as he had gone over Ren’s informal grade tally sheet and found everyone doing rather better than he had expected. 

“You make a good tutor,” Ren had mused absently as he went over Hux’s equations when they were back in their room. “It’s really hard to learn without getting feedback, but ‘most everybody here would pass 11th grade math with a B, maybe a B minus.” 

“Don’t assume everyone here is that capable, though,” Hux had countered. “We’re a self-selecting group of people who are smart and want to learn so there’s almost no coasting at all. I’m not sure anyone outside of the study group actually cares about passing exams any more, and it’s not like I can blame them.” 

“True enough,” Ren murmured. He looked up then at Hux, who had been sitting cross-legged on his bunk with _Moby Dick_ spread out on the mattress before him. “I should have learned that lesson about the difference between coasting and learning,” he continued, apropos of nothing as he put his pencil down. 

Hux stopped reading and waited for clarification, but Ren remained silent. Something occurred to him then. “Ren, you need to know. Mitaka killed himself while he was in the upper bunk. I got woken up by his blood dripping onto my face. I mean, if you want to trade bunks with me…” 

“Damn,” Ren breathed, “What are the cons of trading with you?” 

“The upper bunk’s safer, kinda,” Hux sighed, “Usually if someone wants to fuck around with a kid here it’s sort of a - not spur of the moment thing, but like, they like it to be convenient? So like, if Snoke wanted to -” he paused, took a deep breath to stifle the anxiety welling up within, “to feel you up or something, it’d be much easier for him to do it if you were in the lower bunk.” 

“Aren’t we locked in here past lights-out, though?” Ren glanced up at the bunk bed, and then at Hux sitting huddled over the oversized book before him. Without warning he got up from his seat at the table and sat down on Hux’s bunk on the other side of Moby Dick. 

Hux felt himself tense briefly at Ren’s carelessness and ease - he hadn’t yet learned hypervigilance, nor did he think of the effect he had on the space he occupied and the people around him. “The guards have keys in case something happens in the middle of the night,” Hux said after a moment’s silence. “I don’t think Snoke should have a set, but he has them, I know.” 

Ren’s eyes flashed with hatred bright and intense, and Hux marveled briefly at how unguarded he was in these moments. “And nobody here has tried to stop him?” he asked, almost indignant-sounding. 

Hux’s initial reply was a sharp, bitter laugh. “Why should they?” he asked rhetorically. “I assume his parish sent him here so he wouldn’t get caught fucking an altar boy from a good family, and nobody really cares about most of us. You can try to tell your parents in a letter, I guess, but the staff censor our outgoing mail. Write something they don’t want to get out, and your letter never makes it. Plus, the phones are out in a public area, and you know someone’s going to be listening while you talk to your parents.” 

The light in Ren’s eyes went out as quickly as they had appeared, as he absorbed everything Hux had been telling him. “And we don’t really get unsupervised visits,” he mused. 

“Nope. The mindset, I think, is ‘they should have been better-behaved if they didn’t want to be here,’” Hux recited in a perfect facsimile of his father’s authoritarian disdain, “so if someone is stuck here, then they obviously deserve everything that happens here.” 

Ren shook his head hard, snorted as unruly strands of his hair caught in his eyelashes. “That’s bullshit,” he said as he pushed his hair out of his face with his right hand, “I admit I totally should have been a better person, I guess, but you did nothing, and you don’t deserve what’s been happening to you. That’s unfair.” 

“Look, Ren,” Hux sighed, staring back down at his book so he wouldn’t have to watch the heartbreaking frankness in his new friend’s expressions, “It’s actually kind of comforting to just accept that life is unfair. If life is fair, right? Then everything bad that happens to you is because you deserved it, and I reject that. But if life is unfair, then it’s just shit happening. People are assholes.” 

“That’s kind of bleak,” Ren said after a minute of silence. 

Hux laughed again, no less bitterly than before. “Call it radical pessimism, if you want. Survival through depression.” 

“Right.” Hux watched Ren draw his long legs up beneath him in his peripheral vision, shifting to sit cross-legged on the mattress. “Look, Hux, I’ll - I’ll take your bunk. But not because I’m scared.” 

“Why, then?” Hux asked, feeling oddly choked. The sensation reminded him of the time he had wound up sick with bronchitis last year. He had caught it scrubbing the showers on punishment detail, and the guards had hosed him down out of sheer spite, and then not let him change into dry clothes until several hours later. He had spent the better part of a week in the infirmary afterwards. Don’t look up at him, Hux thought reflexively, did not know why he felt so. 

“Rodinon pointed out I’m not exactly Father Snoke’s type, right?” Ren explained, “And you told me he’d hurt you before. Maybe it’d be safer for you.” 

That surprised Hux. “Kylo Ren, you know you don’t survive this kind of place by being heroic and doing people favors,” he said, fighting the urge to look up from his book. He stared instead at his own bony fingers, splayed out over Herman Melville’s description of turning a whale foreskin into a kind of raincoat. That chapter had always amused him grimly once he had figured out, no thanks to Melville’s obfuscatory prose, what it had actually been about. 

“Yeah, but you let Dopheld Mitaka have the top bunk, ‘cause that’s where he was when he killed himself.” Ren countered hotly. “You tried to protect him, Hux. How many people have you helped and protected here? You set up the study group, you pass warnings around during lunch and study session, you watch out for people. You’ve been helping me.” 

Ren’s earnestness twisted in Hux’s chest, and he had to draw a quick gasp of air to stifle the pain. “I’m used to this place, Ren,” he said in his flattest, most even voice, summoning the cynicism that he wore like armor in this hellish durance. “Plus it’s easier for me to survive if I surround myself with other targets.” 

“Maybe,” Ren conceded. He shifted himself so that his back was against the wall, and Hux looked up at him then, caught a lingering something in his gaze. “But you’re a far better person than you believe, Hux. Really.” 

_Not bloody likely,_ Hux thought wearily, before he shut the copy of Moby Dick again. He felt vaguely uneasy and curiously empty, and could not satisfactorily explain why. 

The truth was that as much as Hux _wanted_ very badly for life to be fair, despites his claims otherwise. Therefore, he thought, according to that subconscious desire, that he did deserve what happened to him, because he simply wasn’t worth loving. Perhaps it was better that bad things happened to him, instead of to decent people who simply did not deserve that kind of thing. But it hurt too much to admit those feelings to himself, and so he shoved them down as far away from his thoughts as possible. 

Kylo Ren’s indignation had stirred those thoughts again, roused them uncomfortably in Hux’s bosom. _You are worth loving,_ Ren had all but said, _there is something worth loving in you, and I can see it,_ and it all came painfully close to reminding Hux of the sheer unfairness of his situation. Therefore, he did again what he had done for the past three years, and smothered that fledgeling hope beneath his burden of pain. 

\--- 

Hux rolled over in the unfamiliar top bunk, atop the brand-new, not-lumpy mattress, oddly aware that he could reach up and brush his fingertips against the ceiling from where he lay. He could hear Kylo Ren shifting beneath him, and had been aware that his roommate had been trying very hard to cry quietly for the past half-hour. Ren must have had practice suppressing his sobs - the only thing that gave him away was the occasional shuddery intake of breath. 

It didn’t surprise Hux that Ren was hiding his pain and sorrow under a tough exterior - most of the inmates here did so to some extent, and Ren was doing admirably well considering the circumstances. 

“It’s okay to feel shitty, you know,” Hux said softly, into the dappled semidarkness. Faint, slanted lines of light spread attenuated across the ceiling from the small, barred window. “I mean, I know why you want to hide it, and I guess it’s safer for you, but I’m not going to judge you for feeling sorry for yourself.” _God knows I feel that way,_ he thought without saying. 

There was another long, shaky sigh from below, and then Ren’s deep voice cracked as he tried to speak. “I’m sorry - I didn’t mean to wake you up.” 

“You didn’t wake me up,” Hux sighed, oddly aware of Ren’s vulnerability in this very moment, “I just haven’t slept. And before you start apologizing, you didn’t keep me up either.” 

“Okay,” Ren said. This time he sounded less uncertain, a little steadier in the dark. 

“I mean,” Hux said as he closed his eyes to the ceiling and the world around him, “I don’t recommend crying when one of the guards is yelling at you or something. But here? You need some way to let the bad feelings out, or you’ll go insane.” 

“Thanks,” Ren said after a few moments of silence. “That makes me feel better. But what about your own feelings? Every time I think I see you feeling something, you just make it go away, like you’re pushing it away.” 

Hux didn’t want to lay his burdens upon someone he had known only for one day, but he owed Ren the honesty. “Crying stopped working for me a while ago,” he admitted, thinking of the crescent-shaped cuts in his palms where his nails had dug into them this morning, and how they reassured him. It felt almost soothing that they were there, visible and real tokens of the pain he had been carrying around for so long. 

“Oh,” Ren breathed, almost softly enough that Hux mistook it for a sigh at first. 

“Yeah,” Hux said into the quiet dark, and the conversation ended there as Ren turned around on the lower bunk and tried to go to sleep. 

Hux lay on his back, his eyes closed, and thought of the cool buoyancy of a swimming pool, of floating on top of the water, on his back with the water lapping at his sides. He remembered the burp of chlorine, the startling sharpness of water evaporating on his exposed skin, and let the memory carry him away to a weary, dreamless sleep. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Firearms violence employed on minors.  
> Content warning: Non-graphic, implied sexual violence against minors.  
> Content warning: Forcible starvation of a minor.
> 
> \---
> 
> Hux finds himself at the nadir of his existence when he spends a week locked in solitary confinement. He emerges to find that Kylo Ren hasn't been idle, however, and has used the time Hux was away to orchestrate a complex and audacious plan for escape. Can Hux trust his new roommate enough to go along with the plan?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please observe that I, the author have not actually experimented with potassium permanganate and glycerin as a firestarting method, but there are articles all over the Internet about the method, along with the chemical reaction equation so you know what exactly is happening in there. I have also taken some liberties with the method.
> 
> Please for the love of Ao3 do not set anything on fire trying to do it like Thanisson does.

Hux found himself in solitary confinement a week after Kylo Ren’s arrival, courtesy of his stepmother Maratelle. She had taken it upon herself to remind him unsubtly to keep his mouth shut, and she had always eschewed crude beatings in her methodology. Hux knew that he was in trouble when Smythe interrupted Mr. Prentiss’ class to collect him, with Wilkerson waiting outside. He had only the time to ask Ren to collect his sketchbook and pencils for him before he was hauled roughly out the door and marched down the corridor to the laundry wing. He had learned better than to ask what they thought he had done wrong, and only went along quietly as the panic in him rose and rose to some kind of shrieking, unbearable pitch. His fingers and toes were cold and numb, every nerve vibrating on a frequency too high for humans to hear. 

“Take off your shoes,” Smythe told him as they marched him into a converted washroom that had been employed on uncooperative boys in the past. Slowly and carefully, Hux tucked the toe of his left shoe against the heel of his right and stepped out of it, repeated the process with the other foot. 

“Now your clothes,” Wilkerson smirked, twirled his nightstick when Hux hesitated. This wasn’t the usual routine for solitary. He could feel his world starting to recede to a safe distance as he unzipped his trousers and stepped out of them, unbuttoned his shirt to reveal his hollow, bird-boned chest to the world. He was briefly grateful, through the fear, that he had passed the Mitaka note off to Finn, who would pass it to the other members of the Library Club to sign and affirm in the meantime. Smythe simply collected the clothes as Hux stripped down to his underpants and stuffed them into a paper bag with his shoes. 

“Get in there,” Smythe said, once Hux was standing goose-pimpled in the hallway. He stepped into the washroom without hesitation, barely registering the rough hand hot on his back. It was as though a camera were panning. He was no longer seeing out of his eyes or living in his flesh - only experiencing everything remotely from some point above himself. The room had been scrubbed clean, at least, and the white tile walls and floor gleamed coldly in the thin light of a single bulb in a recessed socket. There was a toilet in one corner of the room, a spigot low on the wall, and plastered-over spots where the plumbing of a sink had once been. A thin mattress and rough blanket lay on the other side of the room, and facing the commode was a built-in floor drain, the grate cemented in. 

“Maratelle says hi,” Wilkerson told Hux as he was shoved roughly against the tile wall - his skin prickling distantly from the cold, and then the door swung shut behind him. He heard the lock engage with a final low click, and then crouched down on the mattress with his back to the tiles, with his knees drawn up to his chest. The floor was cold and hard through the inadequate padding, and Hux eventually grabbed a corner of the blanket and pulled it round himself, swaddled himself against the merciless light. It wasn’t as though sleeping this way actually protected him from anything - it just meant that anyone hitting him would land blows on the boniest and most easily-bruised parts of him - but it was oddly comforting to cocoon himself like a pupating grub while he slept. 

_Now for the long wait,_ Hux thought as he tried to find a comfortable position in his corner. _Every day I spend in here is another day closer to eighteen. I just have to take this one second at a time._

\--- 

The most cruel thing about solitary confinement was that one had no idea how time was passing outside. The light in the converted washroom was constantly on, and Hux could only see out in the hallway by lying with his face pressed closely to the narrow gap under the door. 

It wasn’t as though mealtimes were a regular thing. Hux felt himself growing hungry long before paper plates of cold food were shoved in through the locking slot on the door. Water ran from the tap when he turned it on, but it came in a weak trickle that he had to collect in the cupped palm of his hand and sip therefrom. 

Bored, cold and half-starved, Hux chose to lose himself in memory again. He no longer remembered what his birth mother looked like, only the soft coo of her voice, always slightly smoky from cigarettes. Her hands always smelled like bread, and he distinctly remembered the stiff feel of her white jacket when she picked him up after a long day of work. She was still alive after all. In Boston, if what Maratelle had let slip was true. What had years of prison done to her? 

Hux didn’t want to hope, but there was a part of him that would not and could not give up on her, and he could only imagine that she would understand how he felt about the years he had spent here in the Arkanis Institute. She had been a cook, he remembered, and for a few hours he let himself spin a cotton-candy fantasy of living with her in Boston. The sky would be cold and gray and leaden this time of the year, and the inside of her small apartment would be warm and comfortable. There’d be the smell of soup on the stove, and bread. Maybe a pet cat, too, warm and soft against his lap as he sat on the saggy old couch reading an assigned passage. She would come home late at night, weary and footsore, and he’d stay up just long enough to kiss her goodnight, and he would get the coffee started for her in the morning. 

These thoughts only made Hux hungrier and colder, but they nourished his soul and fed the guttering lamp of his hope. _I’ll find you, Mom,_ he thought, remembering the day she had been taken away from him. Blue light in the rear view mirror, and his mother getting out of the car. Her screaming _no_ repeatedly through a sound like raw meat dropped on blacktop, a hard packed noise echoing again and again in the dome of his skull. He had screamed and cried hysterically as he had tried to wriggle out of the car seat in the back. Someone took him away afterwards, and then Maratelle was dragging him along by the wrist as she walked away with him. 

“Your Mom is dead,” Brendol Hux told him, “She is gone. She will never come back.” 

_She is not dead,_ Hux chanted silently again and again, as the minutes dragged on. _I can’t kill myself here. I have someone to live for now. Wait for me._

\---

Hux had given up trying to track the days when the door opened and shut behind him, and a savory smell wafted in. French fries and hot oil, something else. His empty belly growled audibly in the room as he shifted upon the thin mattress that had been his refuge for the indeterminate period of time he had been held here. He was shivering from the cold and hunger-induced weakness, but the goosebumps gave way to visible tremors as he registered the person who had come into the room. 

Black, scuffed loafers at the bottom of black trouser legs, and Hux let his gaze creep up along Father’s Snoke’s vertical form, noting the paper fast-food bag in his right hand, and the large soda in his other. A familiar sensation rose up in Hux’s belly then, something like the dizzy lurch that happened when he missed a step climbing down stairs, or that terrifying weightlessness in deep water, when his feet could not touch the bottom. 

“They’ve been starving you, haven’t they, my son?” Snoke asked Hux, knelt to smooth a sweaty lick of hair out of his eyes. “I thought you might be hungry.” 

Hux nodded slowly, trying to disguise his desperation, knowing all too well the price expected for luxuries such as this, but even the effort of moving his head made black dots swim before his eyes. He wanted to go away again, to retreat to the back of his skull where everything would be safe, but the food smelled so good, and he was so empty and wretched. 

“Poor child,” Snoke murmured sympathetically. He placed the bag carefully on the tiled floor, just out of Hux’s reach, and held the covered paper cup out to him. The straw scraped briefly against Hux’s cracking lips, and then he was sucking down iced cola as fast as he could swallow it. The sugar went straight to his bloodstream, set his heart pounding wildly in his ears, before Snoke took the cup away. 

“Slowly, Armitage,” he cautioned, “It’s not going anywhere. You don’t want to choke.” His creased, long-fingered hand reached into the paper bag and pulled a single hot french fry, laid it lightly on Hux’s tongue in the manner of a communion wafer. The salt stung on Hux’s parched tongue, but he chewed quickly, swallowed it almost whole in his desperation. Self-loathing crawled on Hux’s skin even as his belly warmed and filled - he had missed flavor so much, missed the sweetness of cheap ketchup and the sour tang of pickles, the sharpness of onions as he ate the burger straight from Father Snoke’s hand. 

With Hux’s self-loathing came shame - shame that he was so easily bought and owned. But it was food, regardless of its origins, and he needed to survive, reminded himself of his mother waiting for him in Boston as he licked the last grains of salt from Father Snoke’s fingertips. 

\---

Hux lay alone afterwards, his belly full and heavy with a blend of guilt and nausea alike, slick and slippery. Part of him wanted to retch, but he clamped his jaw down hard and lay unmoving with his chest pressed to the thin mattress beneath him. He rolled onto his side as the nausea began to subside, enveloped himself in the grubby blanket again, and closed his eyes against the lightbulb above him. 

Hux wished he could cry now more than ever, wanted to let out the pain beneath his skin and trapped in the ivory dome of his skull. Would it come out if he smashed his head against the unyielding steel of the faucet until something cracked? _Mom, oh Mom,_ he thought as his fingers closed white-knuckled against the cloth swaddling his body, _why haven’t you come for me?_ He wanted to believe that she would have come here for him if she could have. That maybe she just didn’t know where Brendol and Maratelle had taken him. The cynical part of him whispered that maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she just wanted to be rid of this child who had been the cause of all her misfortune. 

Hux couldn’t summon the anger to blame her if that was the case. Maratelle hadn’t wanted him, either, in the end, and Brendol had never really wanted him in the first place. It was increasingly hard to fight off the suspicion that it was something inherent to his flawed self, that this was all happening because he somehow deserved it. 

Hux closed his eyes and somehow slept, woke an unguessed time later only to find the light still on and the door still locked, felt something in him creak and give under the added burden of his woes. He was going to break, he realized, felt a perverse lack of surprise at that - he was going to break and lose it and lose the fight, but surely nobody could be expected to fight for so long and so hard, starved and alone and abused. 

“Please,” Hux rasped aloud, his voice barely audible, “someone. Help me.” He crawled slowly to the locked door of the room, and scrabbled at the locked meal slot near the bottom. He dug his nails into the crevices where the metal fit imperfectly and pulled, felt his nails crack as the cover failed to budge. 

“Let me out of here,” he begged, whined softly as he continued to scratch at the door. His blood began to smudge against the door’s surface, collecting in the crevices around the locked meal slot as his nails broke up into the quick. He did not feel the pain, did not notice the skin tearing off his fingertips as he clawed again and again at the door’s unyielding surface in an ever-growing panic.

There was a brief scrape from something outside, and then his raw fingertips encountered something soft and thin sliding in under the door. It stuck to his skin and grew tacky with his blood, but he pulled it out from under and squinted to look at it. It was a note written on a piece of toilet paper. The letters swam before his eyes, and he watched his blood drying brown on its surface before the words resolved themselves in his vision. 

_IT’S BEEN 6 DAYS. WE MISS YOU. STAY STRONG._

Printed across the bottom was a single word: _REN,_ and a hasty cursive postscript that read _flush this._

Hux placed his face right up to the small gap under the door and stared out into the hallway, saw a pair of sneaker-soles. Not a guard. Feeling numb and bloated with self-hatred, he pushed the bleeding fingertips of his right hand out underneath the door. Whoever it was on the other side knelt down and touched his hand very gently with theirs, careful not to brush against his exposed nailbeds. 

Hux felt something lurch deep within him as the person on the other side stood up and walked away, and he realized with a vague, exhausted relief that his face was now wet with tears. This brief contact with another person - someone who didn’t want to hurt him - seemed to assuage, if not mend entirely the sense of utter defeat that had been lurking vile and nauseating under his skin. He clutched the note close to his chest in his left hand, over his heart, and wished for a moment that he could keep it. 

Hux crawled slowly and painfully over to the commode in the corner of the room, dropped the bloodied, crumpled square of toilet paper in, and then pulled weakly at the flush lever. The sound of water gurgling rang abnormally loud in the room as he closed his eyes and rested his brow against the cold porcelain tiling. He was so cold and so drowsy now, and he felt the tears run and drip down his face to puddle under his cheek. 

The wetness comforted him then, and he shut his eyes and gave himself over to a feverish sleep full of fish and lake weed and the sound of something roaring in his ears. 

\--- 

Movement and light, painfully bright. Hux turned away from that and retreated into the giddy blood heat surrounding him like a cleansing bath. Voices drawled and gabbled on fast-forward, disjointed in his hearing. He ignored them. 

“- a hundred and four - too long -” 

A blessed coolness against his brow, something cold and wet across his cracked lips. Careful fingers resting on the inside of his wrist as he floated far away in the lake behind his eyes. The touch tethered him to his body, kept him from floating away entirely into the soothing warmth and darkness. 

“ - find out - CPS.”

A sharp, phenolic smell of disinfectant in the air, sheets damp and rough against his sweaty skin. 

He slept. 

\--- 

Hux remained lodged in his bed like a pebble in a pocket, heedless of light, sound or movement. The world encroached and receded in tides that mattered not outside of the brief moments where he was shaken awake and given medication, the liquid sticky and bitter under a false aggressive sweetness. He only knew that he was exhausted beyond belief, and that to rouse him untimely from his bed would have been the equivalent of tearing a tender young sprout from the soil and tossing it aside to wither and dry. 

The drowsy heat within his chest ebbed slowly, however. Clarity slipped slowly into the place it had vacated, and eventually he opened his eyes and blinked his way into full wakefulness. Everything hurt strangely and dully, his joints were stiff as though they had been left to rust, unoiled. The world seemed solid again, however, not liquid as it had previously been, and the dull ache in his chest had receded to a vague tickle. 

The room was lighted, but only partially, and Hux began to make out his surroundings in the half-light. He had been sleeping in the Institute’s small infirmary, and all was dark save for the single light left on in the nurse’s nook. Hux’s dry throat itched fiercely, and he coughed feebly as he tried to sit up in his bed, waking the person who had been dozing in a chair at the side of his bed. 

“You’re awake,” they whispered as Hux sank back down against the hot, damp sheets, exhausted from the effort of coughing. He was dimly aware that he was clothed again in a faded old hospital gown and a pair of pyjama pants. Brown-stained, iodine-smeared bandages wrapped around his injured fingers, secured with medical tape.

“Alma,” Hux croaked. The lunch lady was an incongruous sight in this mean little room, dressed in her usual mom jeans and hippie blouse with an oversized, rabidly colorful windbreaker thrown over her lap. The thing looked about thirty years old. She beamed at him, the smile very white in her dark, round face as he propped himself up on an elbow.

“Hssh,” she told him as she reached for the nightstand by his bed and poured him a half-glass of water. “Drink this first.” She thrust a straw into the glass and then bent its top downwards, and held it out to him so he could drink without spilling its contents. 

“What are you doing here?” Hux asked her after he had drained the glass. _This is how much the desert sands must miss the rain,_ he thought as the cold water soothed the prickling in his throat and settled at the bottom of his shrunken belly. 

“That nurse is evil,” Alma said softly. She refilled the glass and placed it within Hux’s reach on the nightstand. “She went home at the end of the day while you were here running a fever of a hundred and four.” 

“Oh.” That explained the infirmary, then. Hux tried to count backwards, but he remembered only the note that he had flushed, remembered the words written on the square of toilet paper. _IT’S BEEN 6 DAYS._ How long had he been out? 

Alma pulled the pillow off a vacant bed and fluffed it up, helped Hux sit upright as she placed it behind his back. “I was afraid you were going to die that first night, so I told Bill to mind the kids and stayed here with you until four. I been here with you the last two nights, but I guess your fever broke when I was at my shift. Are you hungry?” 

Hux remembered the taste of salt and cheap ketchup, pickles and greasy French fries, and he felt his stomach do a weak somersault as a blend of shame and revulsion filled him. He did not want to eat. His body betrayed him, however as his stomach growled audibly, and he dug his fingers into the sheets. His still-raw flesh stung as he did so, the sensation attenuated by the thin cotton padding and gauze bandages wrapped over his injured nailbeds. 

Alma chose not to notice his apprehension. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, before she began to rummage around in the capacious tote bag at her feet, pulled a silver Thermos flask from it. 

Hux did not have the energy to protest. He leaned back into the pillows propping him up and stared up at the shadowed acoustic board above his head. A wonderful smell began to drift towards him as Alma poured something from the flask into a cup. “It’s just some chicken soup,” she told him as she held the cup out to him, helped him hold it steady as he grasped it in both his trembling hands. “I saved you some from my own lunch.” 

The soup had been in the Thermos flask long enough that it was no longer hot or steaming, but it was still warm enough to be palatable, and its relative coolness made it easy to drink in constant tiny sips, as though the liquid were going straight to his depleted veins. The soup was a little thin, over-salted, but it could have been ambrosia for all he cared. It was the first wholesome thing he had tasted in some time, and the sheer goodness of it left him trembling as he drained the plastic cup.

“Thank you, Alma,” he told her as she refilled the cup with more broth, and then handed him a spoon with which to eat the solid ingredients. 

“You’re always so polite with your please and thank yous,” Alma smiled wearily at him. “I don’t know what you’ve done, Armie, but I can’t imagine you ever doing anything bad enough to deserve a week in solitary.” She shook her frowsy head slowly.

 _I didn’t,_ Hux wanted to say, but he did not, only bit weakly down on his lower lip to stifle the impulse. Professing his innocence had not helped him in the past, and it would not help him now. Instead he concentrated on the noodles and vegetables that had cooked in the soup broth. Clumsily he scooped up the little morsels from the bottom of the cup and ate them slowly and carefully in between coughs and tremors. 

Afterwards she helped Hux carefully to the small bathroom attached to the infirmary and waited outside until he was done, then helped him back to his bed. He wobbled a little as he walked, but he made most of the trip under his own power, with Alma standing by in case he had a dizzy spell or fell down. 

“Will you be okay for the rest of the night?” Alma asked him after he sat back down. Hux glanced at the clock hanging on the wall, squinted. Two AM. 

“Yeah. Thank you for staying with me, Alma, and for the soup,” he said. She didn’t say anything, only blinked very hard and squeezed him gently on his bony shoulder. 

“I wouldn’t want to see either of my boys in your place,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I can’t do more for you - I need the job.” 

“It’s okay, really,” Hux told her. He let her tuck the sheets and blanket back over him and then closed his eyes, listened to the small sounds of her putting her things back in her tote bag. There was a slick rustling of cloth as she put the windbreaker back on, and then the low click of the light switch. The weak light bleeding in through the thin skin of Hux’s eyelids vanished, and then the infirmary door shut as Alma’s footsteps receded down the hallway. 

Hux couldn’t remember the last time someone had actually worried this much about him, and the thought that Alma had cared left a strange, fluttery sensation in his chest. He thought at first that it was the cough that had been plaguing him since he woke up, but realized after a few minutes that it wasn’t so much an itch in his throat as much as a strange kind of excitement. 

Ren had sent him a note saying that he had been missed - something that he had not expected from anyone else in the Arkanis Institute, and Alma’s tiny kindnesses had blossomed into something more substantial while he had been sick. Hux tried not to think too hard about it - the thought that he deserved love and kindness was paradoxically quite painful and distressing. It made it harder to accept that his life was entirely unfair and that he had lived at the whim of corrupt, evil adults for the last thirteen years, simply because it made his feelings of anger and indignation strong enough to hurt physically. 

So instead he pulled the blankets further up over his body, tucking them securely just under his nose, and drew his knees up so he could sleep in a fetal curl. The sagging mattress held him securely in its middle as he did so. _What will I be when they let me out of here?_ Hux wondered, but then flinched mentally from the void that question threw up. He had given up on thoughts of futurity some time ago and had chosen to concentrate solely on survival for the past three years. _Three hundred and fifty-something days to go,_ he told himself, _plenty of time to figure that out._ Weary, he yawned into the blanket he had tucked around himself, and then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. 

\---

Hux woke up the next morning feeling simultaneously better and worse. Better, because last night’s slumber had been truly restful, and worse because his healing fingers had begun to itch under the bandages, and scratching was altogether unsatisfactory and somewhat painful to attempt. 

Nurse Allred showed up at nine-thirty as usual, and she sniffed impatiently in his direction when she had registered that he was awake and conscious. She stuck a thermometer in his mouth for a few minutes, took it out, squinted at it, and then scribbled something in a logbook. She made a brief phone call after that. Hux was not close enough in his bed to hear what she said at the nurse’s station, but she hung up after a few brief sentences, and went back to whatever she had been doing on her smartphone before she had taken his temperature. 

Left to his own devices, Hux made his own wobbly way to the bathroom and relieved himself, wishing he had his toiletries with him. His skin felt damp and sweaty, and his teeth were uncomfortably furry-feeling after so long in solitary. He wanted a shower very badly as well, wanted to scrub himself until he was raw and exorcise himself of the phantoms of Father Snoke’s touch. He did what he could for himself - washed his face and arms in the sink, used a damp paper towel to wipe himself down, leaning heavily on the sink from time to time. He still felt weak and depleted, and he wondered if he was to have any breakfast today. 

He had just gone back to bed and pulled the blankets back over his legs when a polite knock sounded on the infirmary door. 

“Come in,” Nurse Allred said blandly, and the door swung open to reveal someone - Thanisson - holding a plastic tray with a covered bowl on top of it. He was also carrying something tucked under his arm, but Hux was not sure what exactly it was. 

“Hey,” Thanisson said by way of greeting as he put the tray down on the small, wheeled table by Hux’s bed. 

“Hey, Thanni,” Hux said. His throat still hurt somewhat, but he thought that he sounded a little better than he had last night. “What are you doing here?” 

“Alma sent me with your breakfast,” Thanisson said, grinning briefly and humorlessly. “She told Ren you’d woken up last night, and he told us, and then she needed a volunteer to help run this to the infirmary.” 

Hux lifted the plate off the bowl and put it down, mindful not to knock over the condensation-beaded cup of milk beside the bowl. A sweet fragrance drifted into the air as he gazed at the bowl’s contents - instant oatmeal with cinnamon, and a banana sliced into it. It smelt very good and was no doubt an improvement over the runny scrambled eggs that made up most of his breakfasts in the Institute. 

Thanisson’s half-grimace made sense to Hux all of a sudden. “You’re not jealous of me, are you?” he asked after a brief sip of cold milk. 

“What? Hell, no,” Thanisson laughed a little, as though Hux had said something funny. “I mean, it smells really good, and maybe I’m a little envious, but they had you locked in iso a week. You’ve been out sick for three days, plus you’ve been in this shithole for longer than most of us. You deserve a nice breakfast at the very least.”

“Yeah, well,” Hux devoured a spoonful of oatmeal, and then nodded to the thing Thanisson was carrying under his arm - a book. “What’s that?”

“Ren’s been leading the study sessions while you were away, and he’s started us on English Lit. We’ve got photocopies of the text, but he thinks this’ll be easier for you to handle while you’re in bed sick. Anyway, I gotta be in class before Mr. Costa misses me. Someone’ll come collect the tray and dishes later.” Thanisson laid the small hardback book down next to Hux, on top of the blanket and sheets. _A Farewell to Arms_. Ernest Hemingway. 

Hux picked the book up with his free hand while he ate, opened it to find the name _Ben Solo_ scrawled on the endpaper, along with a date from last year. He glanced briefly at Nurse Allred, who was still fiddling around with her smartphone, and then flipped through it. The pages smelled strange and new, a faint ghost of ink and sizing clinging still to the paper, and its corners were sharp and square-edged, relatively unworn.

A paragraph jumped out at him as he leafed through the pages. Marked in fluorescent yellow ink, it was the only passage that had been highlighted in the book at all. 

_The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry._

There was a note, scribbled in pencil on the margin to the side, in the same scrawl he had seen on the book’s endpaper. _you are the most broken person i know,_ it read, _and the very strongest. hang in there._

Hux placed his spoon in his empty bowl, stacked that on top of the plate that had covered it, and drained his cup before putting it, too, in his bowl. That done, he leaned back against his pillow and started reading the book. 

_In the late summer that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains._

\---

Nurse Allred let Hux out of the infirmary at four in the afternoon, after classes were over for the day. Pruitt came to collect him, holding a paper bag with a fresh change of clothing and a wrapped bar of soap in it, and took Hux to the showers for his first ablutions in over a week. He huddled against the wall as tepid water sluiced over his face and chest, scrubbing furiously at himself until the bandages on his fingertips were soaked and his skin was raw and irritated. The prickling stung, but it felt better than the memory of Snoke’s greasy fingers stroking lightly at his chest, the feel of the priest’s stubble scratching against the back of his neck. Pruitt kept his back politely turned the whole time, unlike the other guards, who sometimes leered at and taunted the teenagers standing naked and vulnerable before them. 

Lacking shampoo, Hux rubbed his bar of soap over his head until he raised some suds, and then washed his tangled, greasy hair. The cheap soap left him feeling unpleasantly squeaky and slightly dried-out, but it was well worth the sensation of being clean again. He dried himself with a thin, threadbare towel, and then got dressed. His shoes were missing - for a moment he wondered if Smythe had just thrown the bag containing his clothes and shoes in the incinerator - and he padded barefoot through the hallway with Pruitt at his side. 

Kids were heading from classes to their dormitories, some to do what little homework they had, others to drop their books off while they did chores. Finn flashed Hux a bright smile and a thumbs-up as they passed each other, and others nodded somberly at him. The walls and floor were all still the same, scuffed and stained, but something immaterial had changed. Hux had been intimately familiar with the blend of apathy and learned helplessness that infused the Arkanis Institute, but now the very air was was charged with tension. Hux had never been part of a riot, else he would have recognized the dry, electric feel in the air and the wary hostility in the other students’ eyes. 

Ren was seated at the room’s desk when Pruitt showed Hux into the room, his broad shoulders hunched over as he leaned over whatever he was doing. He straightened up, unafraid, and stood up, pushing his chair away with a loud scrape as the door shut behind them. 

“Hux,” he said, his eyes very bright, and then Hux was backing up, his heart lurching hard against his sternum as he found his shoulders bumping against the closed door. Ren stopped in mid-stride, his hands held out in a thwarted hug, the look of joy on his face souring into something like pain as he read the expression on Hux’s face. 

“Fuck,” Ren said, softly, “Fuck, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He let his hands drop empty to his sides. “I just hadn’t seen you in so long, and I was getting worried…” 

Hux drew a shallow breath as he stood stock-still, pressed against the door as Ren crowded him. He hated himself for reacting thus, hated the pain in Ren’s expression, loathed himself for causing it. “I’m sorry, Ren. I’m not really a - hug kind of person.”

“Yeah,” Ren said, taking a half-step back as he realized how close he was to Hux. Hux took a deeper breath, and then sighed as Ren got out of his way entirely. “Look,” Ren said as Hux staggered further into the room they shared, “Why don’t you just sit down? You’ve been sick, you should rest.” 

Hux sank wearily down upon the lower bunk and sighed gratefully as he closed his eyes for a moment. He clutched the paper bag containing the dirty clothes that he’d have to get washed and return to the infirmary, the half-used cake of soap wrapped in the thin paper it had come in, and Ren’s book. “Thanks for the book,” he said belatedly, drawing it out of the bag and making sure that it had not somehow gotten wet. 

“No problem,” Ren said. The bunk bed shifted under his weight as he pushed his pillow aside and sat down, the frame creaking softly. Hux noted how Ren had been thoughtful enough to leave some space between them after the past few minutes’ anxiety and awkwardness. “I guess I should update you on what’s happened while you were out?” 

“I’d like that, yeah,” Hux said as he dropped the paper bag onto the floor between them and put the book beside him on top of the sheets and blanket. 

“Well, I don’t know if they told you, but… I think I know why you were put in solitary confinement,” Ren said after a few seconds of silence. 

That was no surprise to Hux. “Wilkerson told me that my stepmother wanted me in iso,” he said. 

Ren flinched as though Hux had struck him, despite the distance between them. “Christ, Maratelle Stephens is your stepmom? She was the ADA on my case. My mother wanted me to go into a treatment program after what happened with my dad, but Stephens pushed for charges, and you see how well that turned out.” 

“Unfortunately, yes,” Hux sighed. He drew his bare feet up from the floor, looked at their grimy soles as he crossed his legs beneath him. The casual position was no longer a comfortable as it had once been, despite the mattress cushioning him - he had lost enough weight in solitary and in his illness that he could feel the bony bumps on his knees and ankles bruise his meager flesh. “And of course, the judge who sentenced you was probably getting kickbacks from my dad, which is how you wound up here.”

“Maybe,” Ren said, his dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully, “You know how I signed the note about the Mitaka kid when I first came here. And I saw you pass it on to Finn to sign in study group later.”

Hux gave up on sitting cross-legged, scooted back in the bunk until his back was touching the wall and leaned against it, his knees drawn close to his chest. “Yeah. You think that Maratelle found out about it?” The wall was cold and clammy against his flesh, but its solidity comforted him.

Ren drew his feet up too, and hunkered against the wall as though in imitation of Hux. His shoelaces were mismatched, and Hux wondered how he had not noticed it before. “Finn told me that he managed to pass it all over the Institute. It’s become a small stack of pages, and kids’ve been splitting the pages up and signing redundant copies so that if one of the pages gets confiscated there’s still more as proof.” 

Hux blinked, suddenly connecting the sullen anger outside with the events that Ren had just described to him. “I didn’t know that was happening.” He wanted very badly to hope that this would lead to some kind of change in his circumstances, but he did not dare to.

Ren smiled wolfishly, cynically as though guessing what Hux had been briefly hoping for. “There was a surprise inspection from CPS the afternoon the day you went into solitary confinement, and rumor is that Slips managed to smuggle one of the pages out the day he was released, which was the day before you were put into iso, and he took a phone picture of it and posted it to Twitter.” Ren’s smile widened almost-impossibly, and a kind of wicked glee danced in his eyes. “It’s gone viral. The best part is that it’s apparently the first sheet. The one you gave me, with your signature and thumbprint on it. Which is how the evil bitch found out. No offense, if you’re uh-”

“I’m not,” Hux shook his head once. “Trust me.”

The smile left Ren’s face as quickly as it had appeared. “I can only guess that I didn’t get in trouble over it because I didn’t sign it with my wallet name.” 

Hux wondered at the currents of Ren’s emotions, and how he could slip from mood to mood at the drop of a hat. Silently he marvelled at the kind of environment Ren had grown up in, where he could be so unguarded about his feelings. “So I guess my father and Maratelle are fending rocks,” he said at last, to disguise his study of Ren’s face. God forbid that his new friend would think he was making a pass of any kind. “Lots of rocks, if a CPS inspection actually happened. He usually pays a bunch of caseworkers off to make sure complaints never go anywhere.”

Ren closed his eyes and murmured an oath under his breath, then looked again at Hux with a strange kind of pity in his gaze. “I personally like to think there isn’t evil in this universe, just people being fucked up, but … dude, your dad is kind of evil.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Hux said, staring hard ahead so as to maintain the jaded expression on his face. And then he gasped as Ren’s hand, sound and warm, closed over the fingers of his left hand and squeezed gently, careful of the soggy bandages around Hux’s fingertips and the healing skin that lay beneath. 

“Look at me, Hux,” Ren urged him, earnestly. He turned his head to look at Ren’s face again, saw the fervor in his gaze. “ You’ve managed to weaponize the students at the Institute with your note. You’re going to say, no, people do that on their own, but you did it. You set up the networks it travelled along. You wrote the note. You remembered Mitaka, and you weren’t afraid to put your name on it. Your stepmom put you in solitary because she’s afraid of you and what you can do. That’s why she hates you.” 

“Ren, I -” Hux tried to say, mistrustful of the hope and intensity in Ren’s face. It was so much safer to just not feel, but he was finding it incredibly difficult to remain detached like this.

“I won’t have you diminishing your own importance, because I’m - we’re going to use this,” Ren said firmly, as he let go of Hux’s hand slowly, as though he had just realized they had been touching and was reluctant to let go.

“How?” Hux mouthed silently, his voice failing him in his despair.

“We’re going to fuckin’ escape,” Ren’s whisper softened to the point of inaudibility as he leaned in to breathe the words into Hux’s ear, “And you were the one who made most of this possible.” 

“Tell me how you’re going to do it,” Hux hissed in return. They were leaning so close to each other that Hux realized he could feel Ren’s breath on his skin, stifled a flinch. He did not want to hurt Ren’s feelings, felt oddly protective of his new friend. 

Ren grinned again, his smile snaggletoothed, exquisite. “That’s in the other stuff that I have to get you caught up on.”

\---

The fire alarm went off two hours after lights-out several days later. Hux had lain awake in his bunk, watching the night as his pulse pounded in his ears, afraid of putting too much hope into something that relied so much on others. He could not doubt his friends from the Library Club, though. He had seen the resolve in their eyes, watched them straighten up as though the burdens laid upon them had become a duty instead. The difference amazed him - it was nearly miraculous what hope did for people. 

Hux jerked upright in his bunk the moment the clangorous bell started ringing, bumping the top of his head against the ceiling as he heard Ren roll out of the bunk below. “Ow, dammit,” he hissed softly at the pain, winced and rolled over to crawl out of the bunk and onto the latter. 

“Don’t brain yourself before they even let us out,” Ren laughed quietly, below. “I mean, I could probably carry you, but I’m not sure I want to run like this.” 

“If they let us out,” Hux whispered as he slid down the ladder. Smythe had in fact thrown Hux’s clothes and shoes into a bin in the laundry room, but Finn had noticed the brown paper bag and recovered its contents when on laundry duty. Hux thanked his friend silently as he stuck his feet in his shoes, the laces kept tied loosely so he could put them on quickly. 

“They’ll have to, post-inspection. The fire department’ll be alerted by the alarm system, and your dad probably won’t want the additional bad PR of students left in the dorms to burn during a fire, like this,” Ren said. He scooped up two things from the desk - a sturdy, hand-bound diary that had come with his textbooks and notes, and Hux’s sketchbook, with its usual pencil stub jammed in the spine. “C’mon.” 

Neither of them had changed out of their pyjamas so as not to arouse notice - it was plausible that they would have put their shoes on for the evacuation, and saved things like journals and sketchbooks, but also a little much to be dressed sensibly for what would eventually be a wild hike through rural forests. They’d have to do without for now - Ren assured Hux that he had equipment cached somewhere safely distant from the Institute, and also that he knew how to get there in the dark of night. 

The hall was full of silent, nervous students as Romano unlocked their room door, and Hux noted the pump shotgun he carried on a sling. A row of shells loaded with steel birdshot sat lined up in the shell holder screwed to the shotgun’s buttstock. “Get in line,” he told them brusquely as he left to unlock the room next to theirs - and both Hux and Ren joined the double-file line that was forming down the hall. Birdshot wasn’t enough to kill a human-sized target, but it was enough to cause a lot of physical pain when employed on kids. Aimed correctly it was capable of blinding and crippling when fired at eye level and into points of articulation on the human body. 

Rodinon joined them, and Hux caught a glimpse of Finn as they were marched out into the slight chill of night, to the school’s football field where they could be counted off and contained. That left Thanisson. Several minutes passed as the last of the Institute’s student inmates trickled out of the dorms, but he was still not among them. Hux exchanged a troubled glance with Ren, received a brief squeeze on the upper arm for reassurance, before Rodinon tugged at Hux’s sleeve and pointed to a blond-haired figure waking slowly out of the dormitory building with Father Snoke in tow. 

“He’s done it,” Ren hissed as Thanisson left Snoke behind and joined the students lined up in rows on the pitch, and then went silent as a guard walked past them. There was a loud murmur from the student body as the boys assembled in the field caught sight of the ruddy amber glow emanating from the roof of the school wing, right where the Arkanis Institute’s staff room and offices happened to be. 

That part had been Hux’s idea - to have the initial fire kindled close to the staff room. It made sense for several reasons. Firstly, many of the Arkanis Institute’s records lived stacked on top of and within filing cabinets in a room adjacent to the staff room, and all those dry folders and papers made for great tinder and fuel. Secondly, Hux knew that several staff members had removed the batteries from the smoke detector in the staff room so they could smoke inside during inclement weather, in violation of state regulations. Lastly, and most importantly, Brendol Hux was too cheap and too mean to rent a modern server system, which meant that the digital copies of student records were kept locally on an ancient desktop computer. Destruction of that computer and the paper records would mean that the Institute would have significant trouble tracking escaped students down - which suited Hux just fine. 

Thanisson had volunteered to be the designated fire-starter for two reasons. Firstly, that he was still young and pretty enough to catch Father Snoke’s eye on a regular basis, which meant that he spent more time than he cared to running errands for the priest, whose offices were some way down the hall from the staff room. Secondly, his much-hated father was also a right-wing survivalist nutjob, which meant that Thanisson had been taught to start a fire in more ways than most non-pyromaniacs were comfortable with. 

For this one Finn and Rodinon had quietly purloined potassium permanganate and glycerine suppositories respectively from the chemistry lab and the infirmary. Mixing the potassium permanganate, a powerful oxidizer, with glycerine squeezed from the suppositories led to an exothermic chemical reaction that Ren had written in his notes from Chemistry classes, before he had come to the Institute. 

The equation had read, in his careless scrawl: 14 KMnO4 + 4 C3H5(OH)3 = 7 K2CO3 + 7 Mn2O3 + 5 CO2 + 16 H2O + HEAT. On its own the heat from the reaction would sputter out quite swiftly, but it was still perfectly capable of igniting wood and paper. Thanisson had soaked a dried-out pinecone in the glycerine to make a small firebomb - all he needed to do to ignite it was to cover it in the purple crystals, and then toss it into the staff room’s storage annexe while serving as Snoke’s dogsbody. The documents would smolder and smoke in contact with the burning pinecone, and then catch fire. The actual fire would not be noticed in the poorly ventilated building - not until the fire had spread enough to trigger a non-disabled smoke detector, at which point things were probably too late for any attempt at containment. 

The guards had been staring horrified at the fire spreading throughout the school wing when Finn caught Hux’s eye and nodded. He murmured indistinctly to the students surrounding him near the barbed-wire topped chainlink fence at the back of the field, as Hux clutched at Ren’s sleeve and tugged, alert for action. 

“Stop that!” Romano shouted from across the field as some of the students started to push against the fence that held them in, pumping his shotgun for emphasis. The crowd surged harder in response, and Hux felt the other students beginning to shove him along as that particular section of the fence gave, its supporting posts collapsing as though neatly cut by some invisible force. That part had been Ren’s doing - thanks to the mismatched shoelace in his sneaker, which had held a flexible Gigli saw capable of cutting through wood, metal, and in its original purpose, human bone. He had taken Hux’s advice and curried favor with Coach Zimmer enough to be allowed extra workout time in the field - which had allowed him to saw partially through the steel supports on the fencing in preparation for the fire.

There was a loud pop of shotgun fire, and another, empty shells rattling as they fell to the ground. In that instant Ren seized Hux’s wrist with bruising force and started to run, dragging him towards the gap in the fence as kids between them and the guards fell screaming to the patchy grass, their backs and sides covered in hundreds of tiny bleeding wounds from the birdshot. The escape turned into a stampede, and Hux didn’t so much run as much as just let himself be carried along in Ren’s wake as the crowd of inmates surged, excited and terrified, for the gap in the fence. 

Hux’s chest hurt from the cold air and the crush around him, and he gulped a breath as Ren pulled hard enough on his arm to almost dislocate his shoulder. 

“ - with me -” he heard Ren shout through the clamor of the crowd, and then they were past the chain link fence, trampling over the barbed wire, which poked through the thin soles of Hux’s shoes to pierce his feet. More pops sounded in the background, and Hux felt sharp stinging at the soles of his feet and in his arm as the crowd thinned enough that he could run. He closed his fingers on Ren’s wrist, took another gulping breath, and began to sprint deeper into the woods with his friend at his side, into the unknown night and the world that yawned away from the Arkanis Institute.

\--- 

Hux ran until the world started to blink out of his vision. His legs burned, and his chest hurt for lack of air, and he stumbled once, whooping and coughing, before Ren slowed and then stopped. “You okay, Hux?” he whispered urgently as Hux sank to his knees. 

“Yeah,” Hux panted, “I just need - to breathe.” They were quite alone in the forest. Most of the students had dispersed in all directions once they had reached the woods. Hux was aware of a slight, itching burning pain in the upper part of his left arm, but he could not see if he was bleeding in the dark. Instead he climbed unsteadily to his feet and then leaned hard against a friendly tree trunk. “Where are we?” he asked Ren after he had caught his breath. 

“I ran due north from the Institute once we were past the fence,” Ren said, handing Hux’s sketchbook over to him. He opened his diary, sighed a little, and then ripped the cover off, the muscles bunching in his forearms as he did so. “I was counting my strides as we ran,” he murmured thoughtfully, and Hux watched in a kind of wonder as Ren tore the endpapers off the mutilated covers of his journal. 

Tucked neatly into niches in the book’s cover boards were several items - a small, flat compass, a printed map of the forest around the Arkanis Institute, a thin wad of money in assorted denominations, and what looked like a driver’s license. 

It wasn’t quite light enough for Hux to read the card, but he watched as Ren pocketed it, and then put the compass on a piece of string that he had looped around his neck before he had gone to bed earlier in the evening. That done, he handed the map over to Hux as he riffled quickly through the dollar bills and split it into two wads. 

“Take this,” Ren said, “It’s about a hundred dollars. That’s not bus fare all the way to Boston, but it’ll make things easier for you if we’re forced to split up.”

“Boston?” Hux asked Ren. He fought the urge to cough as he took the money and shoved it down the leg of his sock where it rested furrily against his skin under the elastic. 

“You told me your mother’s alive, and she’s in Boston, right?” Ren took the map back from Hux and unfolded it, stepped out into a clearing to study both the map and the compass in the faint moonlight. 

“Yeah, but - we?” Hux asked. He levered himself off the tree and tucked his sketchbook under his right arm, aware that there was a clammy wetness on his left arm. He was probably bleeding, he thought, but it didn’t feel very severe. 

“I’m coming with you,” Ren said simply. “C’mon. We don’t want to stay too long in case they’ve already started searching the woods for us. I’ve got equipment cached a few miles from here. Let’s go find it.”He folded the map back up, tucked his diary and its mutilated cover back together, and assembled the items into a neat bundle, then offered his right hand to Hux again. 

“Why are you doing this for me?” Hux asked, as he put his hand slowly into Ren’s, amazed at his own lack of fear as he did so.

Ren’s fingers closed on Hux’s own, gentler this time, without the desperate strength of before, but he glanced absently about him as he led Hux out of the clearing. “‘Cause I wouldn’t have made it out of the Institute without you. You’ve got good ears, Hux. Listen out for a search party or dogs, I gotta count my steps to the cache.”

Hux glanced down at his feet as they negotiated the undergrowth in the dark, leaves and branches rustling softly in their wake. The warmth of Ren’s hand was reassuring in the chilly dark, and he found himself falling into step with his friend and following his lead. 

“I’m glad you’re here with me, Ren,” Hux whispered at last, after they had been hiking slowly but silently for an hour.

“So’m I,” Ren murmured thoughtfully. The moon shone brightly through the canopy of leaves overhead, and dappled the forest floor as they walked slowly hand-in-hand towards a freedom that Hux had not dared to believe in until Kylo Ren had entered his life a mere three weeks ago.


End file.
